CIO, Head of Global Infrastructure, and other IT Senior Management have a different requirements for dashboard than technical folks.

Generally they want:

big picture, not details.

exception. Things that they need their attention.

less technical info. Ideally, present in business terms, not IT.

a portal that is easy to access. They may not want to login to vR Ops. If they do, they may forget their password. [e1: vR Ops 6.5 cannot do login-less yet]

UI that is easy to understand. So keep each dashboard to a specific question.

system that is easy to use. So keep the interaction, clicking, zooming, sorting, etc. minimal.

That’s what theywant from you.

What do youwant from them?

You show them something so you can get help (e.g. budget, resource). Here are some goals:

Show transparency. Giving visibility into live environment to senior management.

Prove that you do need additional hardware.

Prove the wastage you have been talking for months.

What do you notwant to show? There are things you do not want to show. Urgent issues are something that you should not display. It is not about hiding information to CIO. This is about giving you the time or space to do your job. If there is an active fire that requires your full time concentration, you do not want to be interrupted by CIO asking why it’s showing red on the dashboard!

I covered dashboard best practice in this post. Read that first, as this blog builds upon that.

Done? Great!

We take the same approach we did when planning dashboards for specific roles (e.g. Storage team, Network team). We ask a set of questions.

If we implement the above, we will end up with at least 5 dashboards. I’ve combined some of them. I see a wide variety of requirements, so you will customise them anyway 🙂

Basic Visibility

How many VMs in our cloud? What’s their CPU, RAM, Disk allocation? This gives you a size of the environment the IaaS is supporting.

How much CPU, RAM, Disk do we have? Is it enough to support the above requirement?

You should also give the history of VM growth. What is enough today may not be enough in 3 months.

In the dashboard above, I’ve added Availabilityinformation. As VMs can be powered off intentionally by application team, you should only report for Tier 1 VMs. Tier 3 VMs, especially those in Test and Dev, can be rebooted frequently and hence will give misleading information.

Performance

The dashboard below shows all VMs. In a large environment, the heat map will automatically combine VMs with the same value (read: color & size).

Every VM is represented by a box. The box can take on value between 0 and 3.

Green = 0. The VM is served well.

Yellow = 1. One of the IaaS is not delivered as per Performance SLA. We track CPU, RAM and Disk. If your SLA states 10 ms disk latency, then the VM has to get 10 ms.

Orange = 2. Two of the IaaS is not delivered.

Red = 3. All 3 services not delivered.

The VMs are grouped by Datacenter, then cluster. This lets you see which Datacenter or Cluster aren’t coping well.

The above shows the VMs. What about applications? An Application spans multiple tiers and multiple VMs. Just because a VM does not perform does not mean the whole application is affected. As this is for Senior Management, we’re only showing the Tier 1 applications.

Capacity

CIO is not in charge of capacity management. He just need to know the decision you want him to make (which is to approve hardware purchase, or get VM Owners to rightsize). For that, he needs to know if you are running out of capacity, and existing capacity is not wasted.

How is it growing? This can be taken care of by having a projection. This projection should take into account committed projects too.

Capacity is more complex than performance. Just because vSphere cluster is running low on utilization does not mean it can serve the VMs well. See this for detail explanation.

Capacity is best presented with a line chart. This enables you to see the trend. For environment with <10 clusters, you can fit all the clusters in the screen. For large environment, you need to make a trade off:

show live data. You can be detail as you’re only showing 1 data.

show historical data. You can’t be detail as you’re showing >1 data.

Here is an example with historical data. Notice we cannot show details, and the screen only accommodates <10 clusters.

Here is an example where we only show live data. We can show a lot more clusters, and for each we can show CPU, RAM, Disk and Network.

You may run out of capacity. But if you have a lot of wastage, you may have sufficient capacity after you reclaim them. See this for details.

Configuration

Do we have “bad” configuration? Examples are old & unsupported versions of Windows, Linux, ESXi, VMware Tools, etc.

How uniform is our environment? Complexity is required to optimize cost (hardware, software) and performance. However, there is cost in complexity.

Do we have outdated and unsupported products?

If your CIO does not appreciate the complexity, showing CIO the complexity is good for you. It will result in appreciation of your expertise & effort, as it’s certainly easier if the complexity is low. Complexity increases when you have a wide variety of things.

Factor impacting complexity:

No of ESXi versions. The more variants, the more complex.

No of ESXi CPU version

No of brand. The more vendor, the more complex as you need to learn them, and spend time with the their team.

As an Architect, you take into account many requirements when designing your VMware vSphere environment. As an Operations person, I shall not question your Architecture. I’m sure it is fast, highly available, right on budget, etc. My role is to help you prove to CIO that what you architect actually lives up to its expectation. “Plan meets Actual” is what an Architect wants, because that means your architecture delivers its promise.

The planof the Architecture exists in some diagram and documents. It's static.
The realityof the Architecture exists in Datacenter. It's live.

When proving, here are the questions we should be able to answer:

Availability:Does the IaaS deliver the promised Availability SLA? If not, what was its actual number, when was it breached, how long, which VMs affected? For each VM, when exactly it happened and ended?

Performance: Does the IaaS serve all its VMs well? An IaaS platform provides CPU, RAM, Disk and Network as services. If has to deliver these 4 resources when asked by each VM, 24 x 7 x 365 days a year. If not, which VMs were affected by what and when?

Those are simple questions, but are very difficult to answer. Let say you have 10,000 VMs. How do you answer that? How do you provide answer over time (e.g. monthly), proving you handle the peaks well?

To complicate matters, you need to able to answer per Business Units. Business Units A will not care about other business units. Since a Business Unit has >1 apps, you also need to answer per application. An application owner only cares about her applications.

There are a few things you need to do, so you are in the position to prove.

Step 1: Reflect the business in vSphere

Does your vCenter show all the business units? Can you show how the business is mapped into your vSphere environment? You design vSphere so Business can run on it, so where is the Business? A company is made up business units, which may have multiple departments. The structure below is a typical example.

I see many naming convention that is not operations-friendly. It’s impossible to guess what it is. The names are very similar and hard to read, hence it’s easy for operators to make mistake! In some companies, these operators are outsourced or contractors, who are not that familiar or don’t care as much as employee. The naming convention typically originates from mainframe or MS-DOS era, where you cannot have space and have limited characters. Examples are SG1-D01-INS-0001W-PRD. Can you guess what on earth that is? You’re right, you can’t. Imagine there are 1000s of them like that, and you have new operators joining the help desk team.

If you have shared application, you can create a folder for that. Multiple vR Ops applications can point to the same vCenter folder.

Folder, Tags and Annotation

Have you seen a vSphere environment where there are tags and annotation everywhere?

It’s rare to meet customers with a 100% well-thought and documented approach to the 3 features above. They may have general guidelines, but not explicit Do’s and Dont’s. As a result, these 3 features are used wrongly.

Use Tags when the values are discrete, ideally Yes/No. I’d use tag to tag the following:

VMs with RDM.

VMs with MSCS or Linux Clustering.

Do not use Tags when the values are unlikely to be common. Use annotation for this. Examples are VM Owner Name, Email Address, Mobile Number. In an environment where there are >10K VMs, there can be 1000 VM Owners.

Do not use Tags to tag Service Tier. For Infra objects such as Cluster and Datastore Cluster, that should be clearly reflected in the name itself. I’d prefix all Tier 1 clusters with Tier 1, so the chance of deploying into the wrong tier is minimized.

Step 2: Design Service Tiers into vSphere

Does your vSphere understand that there are different classes of service? Are Tier 1 clusters and datastores clearly labelled?

You should avoid mixing multiple classes of service into a single cluster or datastore. While it is technically possible to segregate, it’s operationally challenging. Resource Pool expects the number of VMs for each pool to be identical among the sibling pool.

For each tier, you need to have both Availability SLA and Performance. For Performance SLA, review this doc.

Step 3: Define and Map Tiers in vR Ops

Now that you’ve considered service tier into your vSphere architecture, time to show it. You cannot show it in vSphere as vCenter does not understand Performance SLA and Availability SLA. You can use vR Ops do this. Follow this step.

Step 4: Map Applications in vR Ops

Use custom groups to create applications. If you have a proper naming convention, it should not be difficult to select members of the applications. All you need is a query that says the names contains XYZ. There should not be a need for regular expression.

Step 5: Consider Debug-ability

A major area is to ensure the counters are reliable, else it’s hard to troubleshoot performance. The CPU Contention counter, which is the main counter for IaaS Performance SLA, is greatly affected by Power Management. Ensure your ESXi power management follow this guide by Sunny Dua.

Once you have that in place, you will be able to prove that your Architecture lives up to its expectation. Use the dashboards from Operationalize Your World to show that proof!